Antedating Shakespeare’s Poems and Plays

Penny McCarthy is an independent scholar who holds her MA (1991) and D Phil from Sussex University, England (1997). She held an honorary research fellowship in English at Glasgow University, Scotland (1998-2010). Her original degree was in Classics, from Oxford University, England. She has published two monographs, Pseudonymous Shakespeare: Rioting Language in the Sidney Circle (2006) and Discovering the Hidden Figure of a Child in Shakespeare’s Sonnets as the Key to a New Interpretation (2015) (awarded the D. S. Evans Prize for a distinguished contribution to scholarship). Her essay “Autumn 1604: Documentation and Literary Coincidence”, appeared in Mary Wroth and Shakespeare, edited by Paul Salzman and Marion Wynne-Davies (2015); and she has had articles on Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, the Gunpowder Plot, and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Tempest published in Notes & Queries, Studies in English Literature 1500-1800, Modern Language Review, Around the Globe, Critical Survey, and the Times Literary Supplement.